The Salvador Option has been invoked in Iraq

Other than the one stated here, there was another big Bushite need for Al Zarqawi:

The need to continuously connect Al Qaeda to Saddam and Iraq. Zarqawi had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, until the U.S. government propaganda machine made it so.

That is the one thing that made the invasion of Iraq somewhat legitimate given the resolutions passed by Congress.

That is why the Bush administration continues to insist on this story being true, even though it makes no sense at all, and never has.

The Salvador Option has been invoked in Iraq:

"The lifts in the New York Hilton played CNN on a small screen you could not avoid watching. Iraq was top of the news; pronouncements about a 'civil war' and 'sectarian violence' were repeated incessantly. It was as if the US invasion had never happened and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians by the Americans was a surreal fiction. The Iraqis were mindless Arabs, haunted by religion, ethnic strife and the need to blow themselves up. Unctuous puppet politicians were paraded with no hint that their exercise yard was inside an American fortress.

And when you left the lift, this followed you to your room, to the hotel gym, the airport, the next airport and the next country. Such is the power of America's corporate propaganda, which, as Edward Said pointed out in Culture and Imperialism , 'penetrates electronically' with its equivalent of a party line.

The party line changed the other day. For almost three years it was that al-Qaeda was the driving force behind the 'insurgency', led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a bloodthirsty Jordanian who was clearly being groomed for the kind of infamy Saddam Hussein enjoys. It mattered not that al-Zarqawi had never been seen alive and that only a fraction of the 'insurgents' followed al-Qaeda. For the Americans, Zarqawi's role was to distract attention from the thing that almost all Iraqis oppose: the brutal Anglo-American occupation of their country. "